Thoughts from the Bus
Commentary by Kathryn Blume,
September 8, 2011, page 2.....

Sunday morning, August 28, as the rains from Hurricane Irene began, a group of Vermonters boarded a big tour bus. Paid for by donations from friends all over the world, this bus would carry them south for ten hours to Washington, D.C. Armed with banners, business suits, Obama ‘08 campaign buttons and 30 plush toy Planet Earths, their goal was to follow fellow Vermonter Bill McKibben and almost 400 other concerned citizens and get arrested outside the White House.
These arrests, part of a two-week campaign of direction action, protest a plan to build a pipeline that would carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands all the way down to refineries in Texas.
I can imagine that as they drove past areas of the state about to be inundated by flood waters – some for the second time this year – they were probably thinking about a couple of things.
Some were probably thinking about those rising waters, hoping their friends, colleagues and communities would be OK, Hoping that there would be enough money, elbow grease and stamina to clean it all up. Again. Wondering how many times this is going to happen – again and again ­ as global temperatures rise and extreme storms become more and more common.
Some were probably thinking about Petropolis, a documentary film about the tar sands shown at a fundraiser for the trip a few nights before. They were probably thinking that “tar sands” are such a benign-sounding name for the gigantic industrial strip mine that has been scraping the boreal forest away, chewing up the bones of the earth for oil, and that already emits more carbon dioxide than all the cars in Canada.
Some were probably thinking about a report issued by the State Department a couple days before they climbed on the bus. This report said that the pipeline project would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.”
Some were probably thinking about a comment made by NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen. Hansen said that if the pipeline is built and the tar sands are fully developed, it would be “game over” for the climate.
Some were probably thinking about President Obama, in whose hands the permit for the pipeline lies. They were probably thinking about his acceptance speech when he won the Democratic nomination, in which he said people from the future would look back and see that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” They were probably wondering what happened, and why they even needed to be on that bus in the first place.
Some were probably thinking about the act of getting arrested and the combination of fear, anticipation, joy, resolve, determination, desperation, commitment, devotion and love embodied by all the other people on that bus.
And some might not have been thinking at all. Some might have been singing. Some might have been singing a song taught to them the night of the benefit, a song from the Yoruban people of Nigeria, a song that is quickly becoming the anthem of the climate movement. Ise oluwa, kole bajey o – that which the creator has made can never be destroyed. Ise oluwa, kole bajey o.
Let’s hope so.

-Kathryn Blume